Stallman — 20 Years of Explaining Free Software

H4x0r Jim Duggan writes "The first recorded talk by Richard Stallman on free software was in 1986, so I've picked from the 2006 recordings and have made a transcript of a recent talk: The Free Software Movement and the Future of Freedom. Those two are the only transcripts of his general free software talk. Others that exist are on specific topics such as patents, GPLv3, copyright, etc. For those who've been reading Slashdot during the gradual evolution of Stallman's pronouncements, it's interesting to see what has changed over 20 years."

Comments

Correct me if I'm wrong...

[Zirtix]

Wouldn't it be more efficient to just distribute the diff?

--- oldspeech
+++ newspeech
@@ -202905339 +202905339,2 @@
Software should be free.
+Software patents are bad.

Re:Bleh

[Dik Zak]

what has HE done? He developed the original Emacs, GNU Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, and the GNU Debugger. That's a pretty serious contribution you know.

Re:No

[swillden]

If Linux Torvalds hadn't got involved in software RMS would have a following of academic lisp gurus numbering nearly in three digits.

I doubt it. If Linus hadn't done what he did, I think there would have been another kernel by the mid-90s. Perhaps it would have HURD (I think the availability of Linux slowed HURD development), or perhaps it would have been BSD, or perhaps it would have been something else. Linus' contribution was important, but the kernel is one of the smaller components in a full operating system.

If Richard Stallman hadn't got involved in software Linux would have a different compiler.

And a different license. If RMS hadn't started GNU, Linux would have had a BSD user environment, and probably a BSD license. It's hard to say what the impact of that would have been. It seems clear that a BSD-licensed Linux wouldn't have gotten all of the corporate participation that the GPL-licensed Linux has.

Without GNU, I also think Linux would have been delayed for a few years, because it would have been necessary to either write all the user space tools or wait for the BSD settlement to legitimize the BSD stuff.

Getting back to the question of the compiler, I wonder what Linus would have used if GCC weren't available. What were the options for a poor college student in 1991? I was a student at the time, and I know that the compilers available to me were Borland's Turbo C and compilers from OS vendors, including Microsoft, Sun, HP and DEC. Borland's was the the most accessible to students, because of their education prices, but neither it nor Microsoft's compiler would have run on Linus' fledgling new OS, unless it provided a DOS-like kernel interface. The others were really expensive. The BSD and Minix compilers were around, but I'm not sure if he could have used either of them legally.

Perhaps Linus would have had to write a C compiler as he was writing his kernel? I really don't know the answer to these questions.

Speculating about how Free Software history would have changed with either RMS or Linus removed from it is complex and difficult. There were a lot of interrelated factors.